Waywords and Meansigns

Waywords and Meansigns is an international project setting James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to music.

Through unabridged musical interpretation and adaptation, Waywords and Meansigns explores the parallax range and depth inherent to Joyce’s great “Here Comes Everybody” text.

Joyce scholar Finn Fordham describes the music of Waywords and Meansigns as “rich and various, surprising, amusing, weird. Different musicians frame different readings, and their different styles offer a series of unexpected transformations of this endlessly transformative text.”

With an additional goal of rendering the Wake more accessible to newcomers, all audio from the project is distributed freely online via Creative Commons licensing.

Project director Derek Pyle will be in residence at Diasporic Joyce in 2017, where conference attendees can experience Waywords and Meansigns through an on-site audio-based installation. There will also be opportunities for attendees to contribute their own voices to the project, through recorded reading sessions.

For more information about Waywords and Meansigns, visit the project’s website.